Live Simply. Love Generously. Care Deeply. Speak Kindly.

Category Archives: future

This post is part of the June Synchroblog which asks the question “what would you tell your younger self if you could travel back in time?” So, without further ado, here you go …

Nothing mind blowing here – in fact, I feel like I have known these things all of my life, although it took a long time for me to “really” believe them.

My younger self would probably say, “tell me something I don’t know, like where to invest my money and who to marry!”

Yet, these are the things I would share with the hopes that my younger self would “get it” a lot sooner than I did …

1) You are enough! No, seriously, you are! So stop doubting yourself and get on with being “you”! Don’t waste any more time trying to be what you think others want you to be. Be you and enjoy it! You will be loved and accepted as you are! No, not by everyone – but there will be “enough” love and acceptance. So, believe in yourself! You are smart enough – you are good enough – you are pretty enough – you are enough!

PS Other people are also enough! Let them be who they are – give them lots of space and encouragement to be themselves!

2) Take more risks! Don’t just do the things that you know you are good at … do the things that you are passionate about – the things you dream of doing. Sure, you might have a few more failures but who knows what you might succeed at … and a few failures here and there make for a good story.

3) Give up perfectionism! Being perfect is way over-rated! AND it’s impossible to achieve! You will only end up frustrating yourself and others. Lower your expectations of yourself, others, even God! Relax a little more! Breathe deep several hundred times in a day! Spend more time in the present! You really don’t want to miss a thing!

4) Think for yourself! Don’t believe anything until you have thought about it, examined it, pondered it, studied it, argued against it and finally deemed it worthy to believe! No matter who said it or endorsed it! No matter how many people believe it or how long it has been believed! No matter how many times you have heard it! Think for yourself!

5) Always! Always! Always! stand up for what you believe in … while at the same time Always! Always! Always! take into consideration that you might be wrong about what you believe! So live out what you believe with conviction but hang on to enough humility to be able to receive new information. Your beliefs will change over time and it doesn’t have to be so hard when that happens.

6) Invest $50 in the stock market every month. Eat out less – buy a few less clothes – go out one less night a month. You can do it and it will be worth it!

7) Intentionally create stillness and quiet into your life. Learn to meditate and do it regularly. Go for walks or ride a bike alone. Sit and daydream. These things will open up the creative juices inside of you like nothing else. This is how you will discover the best ideas that are living inside of you. This will be one of the most important aspects to becoming a whole, healthy, happy person. Start immediately!

8) Trust your gut! You really can know what you should do, what job to take, who to date, what to purchase etc. That doesn’t mean you have to decide quickly. Take your time and think about it, gather information – but in the end trust your gut. You will know – so trust yourself!

9) Worry less! It doesn’t help. Think about what needs to happen and make a plan and do it … but stop worrying about it.

10) More often than not LOVE is the answer! I know it sounds cliche but it is true. Love is what matters and more times than not it is what wins in the end. It’s hard to explain but trust me on this one. Don’t ever give up on love! Give it, receive it, embrace it, practice it! LOVE LOVE LOVE! LOVE ON!

Last week I wrote about whether or not we really needed economic growth, and I claimed that the central problems facing our economy and our society were not about the size, scale, or growth of our economy, but rather about some deeper, undisclosed set of problems. This week I am trying, haphazardly and tentatively, to work through what those problems might look like. Also to predict the future.

One of the things that bothers me about economics—both in its academic guise as a social science discipline and its neoliberal political guise as a quasi-religious faith in which bankers and CEOs serve as high priests—is its general failure to talk about what it’s for. Historians have a whole subfield, historiography, dedicated to how and why we write history. But because the economy is so self-evidently important to the fabric of our society, economists get a kind of pass. Economics is important…

#1 – Has What Emerged Retreated?

I ran across an interesting series that Kester Brewin wrote about participants of the Emergent Movement in the UK returning to the institutional church and organizations. He addresses this topic to some degree in his book Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures (which I have now ordered and am looking forward to reading). The series (and the comments) covered a lot of interesting topics including how spiritual maturation takes place (part 2), how institutions can become damaging and what can be done to counteract that (part 3), some info about Vaux (a community of artists and city-lovers who sought to explore the Christian faith through the media that came naturally to their hands) and Temporary Autonomous Zones (part 4). Jonny Baker and Andrew Jones both post responses to the series. Of course the authors are all from Europe which is some years ahead of the US regarding emerging/emergent Christianity, but there are still many similarities. What do you think? Is a retreat taking place? Is it maturation? Has the institutional church changed?

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#2 – Happy Christian Women…Really??? and Drinking The Company Kool-Aid

Pam Hogeweide and Kathy Escobar have written posts in response to a recent Barna survey of Christian women requested by Jim Henderson of Off The Map for his latest writing project about how the modern American church treats women. I believe that this is a very important issue and am disappointed that no woman is authoring the book with Jim on this project (Pam addresses this in her post) but do appreciate that Jim is at least asking women (here) to let him know if their experience matches the survey results from Barna (mine don’t and I let him know). Check it out and let your voice be heard.

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#3 – Good News and Bad News

The good news is that the PCUSA General Assembly voted in favor of lifting the ban of non-celibate gay and lesbian clergy. The bad news is that they voted to not even hear or discuss the issue of same sex marriage and so it is tabled for two more years.

Soul Force held a demonstration at the proceedings and some were arrested because they refused to leave. There seemed to be some differing opinions (check out Shuck and Jive post and comments) about Soul Force being there but I appreciated them being there to represent the voice of the oppressed and excluded.